I was much too young to be personally involved in this escapade but it is a story that was told and re-told many times around the table in later years at family get-togethers. Knowing my older brothers as I did I am convinced it is a true story.
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There were hundreds of oil wells on the leases around Drumright and Oilton OK on which we lived in the 1930's. Some had been capped but a good many were still producing crude oil. Its smell hung in the air and the thick, black, tarry stuff the movies called “Black Gold” lay in puddles on the ground around the wells. Those leases were One summer day Robert and Rudy, the oldest two Carriker kids began poking around and into one of those puddles with stick. Robert, always the curious adventurous one, asked Rudy “How do you suppose they get gasoline out of this stuff?” Rudy obviously didn't know so they asked an oilfield worker who was working nearby. Not having time to waste with kids he just said: "Well, they send it to a refinery where they boil it down the same way your Mama cooks greens. What’s left is gasoline." He was greatly oversimplifying a refining process he probably didn't know much about.
Robert thought that seemed like a simple enough thing to do so the two boys decided they would make some gasoline. They found a 55-gallon barrel, collected a few gallons of crude oil from the puddles and buckets around the wells and poured it into the barrel. They had watched their mother “boil things down” so they understood the process perfectly well. It was a matter of building a fire under it; let whatever is in the pot come to a boil and then keep it boiling until you you get what you want. Armed with that information and absolutely no knowledge about the properties of crude oil they set their barrel onto some stones, piled wood around and beneath it and set the wood afire. With the fire going sprightly they sat back to watch it turn into gasoline. Insane? Of course: but not to a couple of venturesome and curious young boys running wild and free on an oil lease in the 1930's.
The fire began burning brightly around the barrel. Robert and Rudy watched for what seemed to them to be a long time while nothing happened. They put more sticks and limbs onto the fire. Time passed but still nothing was happening. The sludgy “goo” in the barrel was getting hot with a few bubbles occasionally popping to the surface but it was still just tarry-looking syrup. They were not producing gasoline.
As all boys do when things don’t happen soon enough they became bored and decided the oilfield worker had lied to them. They gave up on "making gasoline" and started off down the road to find something else to do; leaving the fire to burn out by itself. That was probably the luckiest boredom any boy ever felt. They had walked barely a quarter of a mile when they heard a thundering, loud explosion behind them. Turning quickly they saw flame shooting up from where they had been sitting while they had watched the barrel. They had no idea what had happened but they intuitively knew that whatever it was they would be in trouble if anyone knew they were the cause. They hightailed it back home and made sure Mother saw them as soon as they got there. As they grew older and wiser they learned that as the jelly-like crude oil heated up it began to give off highly explosive vapors. The fire found the vapors and the steel drum exploded with a mighty “BOOM!”
They had, with their partially filled barrel of crude oil, built a powerful “Molotov Cocktail" and in the process proved once again that adventurous boys have powerful guardian angels.